Team reduces civilian casualties with exact targeting

  • Published
  • By Navy Chief Petty Officer Douglas H. Stutz
  • Combined Forces Air Component Command Public Affairs
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (AFPN) --  So "all's fair in love and war?" Not to the Time Sensitive Targeting Team -- at least the "war" part.

Team members do everything they can to minimize civilian casualties in the Operation Iraqi Freedom air campaign. They work in Iraqi Freedom's Combined Air Operations Center at a desert air base in Southwest Asia.

Before a strike can happen, the team has to figure out the chances of injury to civilians and nonmilitary property. They call it "collateral-damage estimation." Then they figure out how to eliminate or minimize the risk -- what sort of weapon should be used to hit the target and how should it be delivered? That is "collateral-damage mitigation."

"Even though our top goal is to take out the desired target, our primary concern and bottom line is to lessen and, if possible, avoid, at all costs, any type of civilian casualties," said Master Sgt. Douglas Frickey, the team's noncommissioned officer in charge. "We've been practicing, exercising and refining our efforts regarding collateral-damage estimation for the past decade."

Standing coalition policy states operations are conducted in a way to minimize injury to civilians and damage to nonmilitary objects. Many sites are protected: They sites cannot be attacked unless they are used for military operations.

The sites include cultural and historic buildings, nonmilitary structures, civilian population centers, mosques and other religious places, and hospitals and other facilities displaying the Red Crescent or Red Cross.

The team's task has not been easy. According to Defense Department officials, the Iraqi regime flaunted the rules of armed conflict by putting civilians in harm's way. The regime placed missile launchers in neighborhoods, tanks in the shadows of mosques and armored troop carriers in schoolyards, officials said.

The rules guiding the coalition are clear, Frickey said. For an air-to-ground strike, the military must have positive identification of the target, friendly forces and innocents, he said.

"When we know there's going to be the possibility of high collateral damage," Frickey said, "our report automatically goes rapidly up the chain of command. Depending on how high the possible collateral damage might be, the report could go all the way up to the secretary of defense."

"We are very concerned about human life, particularly ours, but also other human life, innocent(s)," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a March 30 media interview. "Think of the Iraqi people not as warriors against the West. These are hostages to a vicious regime. It's important that we win, and we will win, but it's also important how we win."

The use of precision-guided munitions allowed the team to achieve the goal of quickly hitting targets while steering away from civilians, Frickey said. More than 70 percent of the 21,000 munitions dropped for the operation were precision-guided. That is up from about 10 percent for Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Collateral-damage estimation is not a true science, but it is a discipline that requires intense attention and precision, and one in which on-the-job training is the only schooling available, Frickey said.

Considerations for a strike include the fragmentation and explosion patterns of the weapon, the distance it is released from the target and the direction of the attack.

"We use several types of high-tech electronic and computer-program models based on mathematical theories to help us with the ... process," Frickey said. "Everything plays a factor into how a weapon is going to affect a target. We leave nothing to chance."

The first two weeks of Iraqi Freedom, with air-sortie rates averaging 1,500 to almost 2,000 per day, were busy ones for the team, Frickey said.

"With our forces moving so quickly, we were providing collateral-damage-estimation information around the clock," he said. "We like to think that every call we make on a target has the same high importance, and that importance is to hit the target and make sure there are no civilians hurt."